art eight web page

blog!

Murakami Show Takashi Murakami

I am ambivalent, truly ambivalent. After seeing the retrospective of Murakamis career I can honestly say it is one of the few things in life I absolutely hate and love at the same time. I would and have recommended the show, with sincere intentions, and also derided the retrospect with ardent spite. I loved the personally pieces of Murakamis work but hated the blatant and fragrant capitalism driven merchandizing of his work with the Louis Vuitton store.

Walking into the Geffen MOCA I was filled with optimism and glee. My inner child frolicked with bliss as the pretty and bright colors absolved through my eyes. The pink, the blue, giant lactating shiny breasts, overflowing semen twirling toward the ceiling, oh my. This was too absurd and humorous to be worth only five dollars admission. The first three sculptures greeting visitors to the Geffen (Miss ko2, 1997, My Lonesome Cowboy, 1999, Hiropon, 1997) set the perfect mood and tone for the rest of the show. It was going to be fun, weird, and bizarre all wrapped in colors that would cure any depressants. Walking through the rooms I kept thinking to myself this is too funny and why did I not think of this. Murakamis paintings were flat and a lot of them were simple, or at least the subject is simple but multiplied hundreds of times. I thought this was great. Here is a guy that does not care. Here is a guy that makes paintings and sculptures that pleased him more than the expectation of modern art. This is true. In the video tours/artist walk through posted on the MOCA website, Murakami talks about his paintings as results of or are limited to the state of his mind and how much he could afford at the time making them. This is especially pertinent with the Stew Blue, Red, and Yellow paintings he made in 1995. In the video, Murakami describes how depressed he was at the time being in New York by himself, missing home, and being broke. With a limited budget, Murakami bought eight-dollar paints and painted those three. This is endearing to hear. The paintings are very simple. All three have a different one colored background in blue, red, or yellow. In the middle of these flat and un-painterly one-colored canvases are Murakamis fantasy character DOB, stretched and multiplied, right down the middle. Murakami made these out of the need to cheer up and to alleviate the solitude he felt in New York. That is pure and simple. It is like kids who finger paint just because it is fun and the colors are pretty. This was endearing to me. To paint because you want to paint without any convoluted philosophy and/or labyrinthian storyline or plots is refreshing and appealing. Yet, for being so simple, the Stew series does make historical connections to modern art. Immediately after looking at them I thought of Barnett Newmans Onement 1 (1948). How can anything straight down the middle not be connected back to Newmans work? The Stew series was simple, light, pleasant, and paid homage to what came before it without looking like it was being lazy. This was good. I was still excited to see the rest of the show.

My excitement was somewhat subdued as I made my way through the second part of the retrospective. The paintings and sculpture in this section took a giant leap in size and production. Almost everything was huge. The paintings were mural size and the sculptures were grandiose and somewhat invasive. I would imagine walking through this second part of the show is like arriving at cloud nine to any Murakami hardcore admirers. However, the works in this second half lost Murakamis personal connection to them. I say this because there is no doubt Murakami had an army of assistants making these works for him. They are no longer the eight dollars paints being applied to a 24x24 canvas by Murakami as a relief. They are now high production with high budget cost and teams of other painters and sculpture artists.

The oversized works lost the intimacy and joy the earlier works have. Sure they are magnificent objects, size wise, and you have to spend a lot of time with them if you want to see the details and really absorb the work. The sizes of these works demand you to look and gaze. This was a turn off. Looking at these works I could not help but ask why. Why did he choose to paint such frivolity on such a huge canvas? This was a red flag for long-winded explanations that will no doubt does not make any sense at the end. And even if the explanation and thought behind these giant works were short and to the point and endearing like the Stew series then I think it would be overreaching for them to be in such dimensions. I feel as though the sizes of these works were a solution to a problem Murakami ran into during his career. The works no longer have a feel of evolution and progress but rather a the end justifies the means approach. I feel as though Murakami hit a wall sometimes during the years of his career and was stuck. Being stuck and Im guessing pressured, Murakami went big. Because big meant something, right? Big will get more attention and big will stop people, make them stand to ponder and ruminate and spend time dawdling back and forth, to and fro, and around about the works. These humungous works, though there is no doubt how much work, time, money, and effort went into them, feel lazy. Walking through the second part of the show, I felt lost and perplexed as to why. I did not get why and what were the reasons for him to do this. Was Murakami channeling Jackson Pollock with these immense works? If he did then he failed. First, why would anyone channel Pollock? And second he did not even do a good job of doing it, his paintings were not of his own hands. This was bizarre, and not in a good way. However, befuddlement was nothing compared to what I experienced in the last part of the show, the Louis Vuitton iceberg that sank the show.

For a minute second (superfluous use of adjective but necessary) I was relieved when I walked up that white stairs and into the white box that is the Louis Vuitton store inside the Geffen MOCA. I thought it was a joke, a shenanigan. Aright! Murakami left the big stuff behind and now poking fun at something deserving to be made fun of; overpriced ugly brown bags made from the killing of animals for vanity and tawdry endeavors. My excitement and eagerness was duly crushed when I saw the hundred dollar bills being exchanged to the women dressed in white coats with the ridiculous application of pink and green make up. It wasrepulsive. I simply could not believe where I was standing and what I was seeing. People were walking out of that place with their nose in the air holstering those brown paper bags carrying yet another ugly and more grotesque brown bag. It was unbelievable. If Murakami was going for the Andy Warhol effect, he failed miserably. It was pathetic and absolutely abhorrent. For all the good Murakami was able to achieve, he will never make it up for jading me. It was wrong for Murakami to do it and the Geffen MOCA to agree to it. LV is not the Brillo Boxes nor the Campell Soup cans. LV is what made Murakami do tricks.

Leaving the MOCA I could not feel any dirtier. I went in with such willingness and openness to Murakami eccentricities and possibly seeing something Avant Garde but walking out and seeing the queue to MOCA extending to the street all I wanted to do was tell those people it is not worth the five dollars, eight if you are not a student, to go in and experience that tragedy of a show.

These pictures are from Tom Gregg's gallery. He did a series of paintings of glasses filled with water next to a simple object. The paintings were rather small, about 8 by ten, but were really realistic. Glass, especially glasses holding water are extremely hard to paint, but his look really realistic. The objects that he chose to paint next to them also made the piece more interesting. I like how he chose everything from an eight ball to a half eaten hot dog. All of these objects are more opaque than the clear glass with water and are everyday objects that everyone can identify.
Barry McGee

This is a picture from the Barry McGee show at Redcat. He is well known for what he does and I recognized his work from books of graffiti artists. He has a unique style of graffiti and of the drawings of figures that he creates. The weird thing about Barry McGee though is that he started out as a street artist and now does gallery pieces as well, including a past one at the Hammer in Los Angeles. There is an odd tension between gallery art and street art such as graffiti. In one of his interviews online he says that he gets a lot of crap from fellow street artists for "selling himself out." I am not sure what I think of him doing gallery art, or of him keeping the graffiti style in it when he does. Usually those who start in the streets, change their style once they hit the galleries. But Barry McGee kept his style, including building moving mannequins that spray paint the wall.